rSlash - r/Prorevenge Fire Me? I'll Destroy Your Life TWICE!

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

r/Prorevenge In today's episode, OP works as a teacher at a private school. The owner is an incredibly toxic employer who treats his employees like garbage and looks down on his "lessers." He eventually fires OP, so OP goes reports his boss to the government for using hundreds of pirated software programs. The boss got hit with so many fines that he had to shut down his business! Apparently the boss didn't learn his lesson, because he tried to sue OP and lost even more money! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best posts from across Reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash Pro Revenge, where OP completely destroys his toxic boss' life twice. Our next Reddit post is from I Hate People, too. I work in music production. I charge 125 bucks an hour to edit and mix and master recordings from bands, which is about half of the average rate. I had a band come to me, I mixed their album, and it took me about 10 hours. 10 hours times $125 is $1,250. Well, when I was done, they honestly said, well, an hour only has 60 minutes in it, not 100, so your math is wrong and unfair. I was stunned because how can people in their 30s be this uneducated?

I said, it doesn't matter how many minutes are in one hour, I charged by the hour and you agreed to it. They had signed a contract. Well, they left and they refused to pay me. This was their debut album and little did they know because they didn't read the damn contract that I saved backups of all the work I did. And there was a clause that says my studio retains 100% ownership of the music that I work on until I'm paid and sign the rights back off to the band. Again, this is very boilerplate contract stuff in the music industry. They'd planned on selling their CD at concerts for 20 bucks each.

I released their music for free online on every site that I could find, and I also knew the venues where they were playing at, so I made 1500 CDs, which cost me like 200 bucks, but it was well worth it for the spite. And on every gig they had, I would set up a booth with their CDs just outside the property line of the venue and give their CDs away for free acting like an agent of the band. One thing they also never planned on, I made the vocals on the CDs off-pitch with auto tune.

The band broke up about 6 months later after people stopped going to see them. I love absolutely legal revenge. Me and my two friends who helped me had a hell of a laugh. Like we were getting the whole time this was going on, it was great! Pay up or get f**ked! Also down in the comments, we had this story from Mike Mojek. Years ago, when Photoshop was new and I was working as a photographer, I had a regional band come in for a photo shoot for gig promo, showbills, and possibly a CD cover they were

in their process of recording. It took all afternoon, and I shot 6-7 rolls of film. I processed the films, made contact sheets, picked up a couple dozen of the best images for proofs, and I printed them up in house. They came in, looked the photos over, made a good size order, and I started printing everything up, including some nearly poster-sized photos. At At this point they owed me about $1,200. I called to let them know the order is ready, give them the total, and I remind them that I need to be paid in full before I send the photos out. That afternoon they send a guy to pick up the photos, but he doesn't have

any money with them, so he goes away empty handed. Their manager calls me that night and says something like, hey, we need the Prince and Promo material for the CD release party this weekend. I tell him everything's ready, but I remind him that I need to be paid in full before the material goes out. He says, okay, I'll send someone by tomorrow to pick it up. Tomorrow comes, and a different guy shows up, and he also doesn't know anything about a check either, so he goes away empty handed.

The manager, the band members, a sound guy, they all reach out to me that week and I tell him that everything's ready, I just need to get paid. They never get around to paying me, so I never deliver the images. They eventually release their CDs and their CD cover looks like they got someone's beer buddy to take a Polaroid picture. What I did do was use Photoshop to improve the band's pictures that I created. These images went up all over town every time these douchebags had a gig. I made it look like the bass player was writing the drummer like a pony, or I had the acne covered singer yawning while the keyboard player was on his knees in front of him.

Just stupid, unflattering stuff. Within one month, they paid up and got the materials they ordered. I reminded them that if they ever tried to sling any BS to hurt my reputation, I still had the negatives. I never ended up working with them again. They did okay for a couple of years, but they never really broke out. I haven't seen any of them around for years. Our next reddit post is from Fleet Meyer.

Part 1. Where I caused my old boss to lose a buttload of money due to software piracy. A little context. I'm a teacher with the degree in advertising, and I've been involved with IT for the past 20-something years. Although, I recently discovered my love of teaching just 10 years ago. I've taught in a bunch of different schools, from the biggest ones to the smallest ones, and I've accumulated a bunch of experience both in the classroom and behind the scenes, designing workbooks and video courses, learning platforms, etc. So, I started thinking that it was about time to migrate to a management position. The opportunity came in a prestigious school of digital art, and I became its teaching

manager, overseeing all the teachers and the intern learning routines. It was a hard but honest job, for a time. Soon it became obvious that my boss wasn't exactly what he tried to present to students and employees. He would display bursts of anger and antagonize the team, demanding impossible results, and asking about tasks that he never assigned. But that somehow were our job to guess. One time, during a meeting, he grabbed a big chair and pretended to throw it across the

room. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody even flinched, because nobody doubted for a second. It was his idea of a joke. Nobody even flinched because nobody doubted for a second that he was actually capable of doing the deed. Needless to say, nobody laughed either. In my country, employers can hold employees contracts for up to three months, which means that for 90 days you have no job security. And you can be fired at any moment without any consequence to the company.

My boss reminded me about this all the time, half joking, trying to keep everyone on their toes. He actually excused me from this treatment because he had this bad habit of treating the managers differently, and he gave me constant praise for doing a good job until the day that my temporary contract ended. This meant that I was an actual employee with full benefits, and he couldn't fire me without paying me severance pay. So it really surprised me when he started the hostile treatment not 24 hours after my temporary contract ended and the full employment began. Gone were the praises, and in their place came screams, bad reviews, and more and more insane demands. We paid an outside company to do maintenance on the classroom PCs every week, but somehow bugs and crashes were now my fault.

One time he made me stay after hours on a Saturday after all students and staff had left, and prohibited me from going home before I had all the computers running smoothly. He asked me to find him a new seller, and I introduced him to a friend, making it clear that by no means was I asking for him to be hired. I was just making introductions and if my boss liked the guy after they talked then it was his own decision and responsibility to hire him or not. My boss hired my friend and a few weeks later my boss gave me an earful for going for drinks with this friend of mine, saying that managers should stick with managers, and that I shouldn't mingle with my friend,

the staff, because they were beneath us, apparently. I said this was absurd, and I reminded my boss that I knew this guy for years already, and that if my boss wanted to, he could join us for drinks sometime. That was not the response he expected. The abuse continued and actually intensified. One day I started to feel chest pains, and my left arm went completely numb. While my frame called for an ambulance, I retreated to my boss's office, which at the time was occupied by my boss's fiancee and I calmly told her, don't mind me,

I think that I'm having a heart attack, so I'll just lay here for a few minutes so the students can't see me. Of course, she went nuts after this! The good news is that it wasn't a heart attack, it was just an anxiety attack. I was 36 at the time, and my dad had previously passed away from a heart attack, so this news made my mom cry. I decided that enough was enough, so I gave my 30 days notice citing health issues. I hadn't yet completed six months working there.

I sat down with my boss. I didn't blame him in any way, but I said the stress was making me worry about leaving my family too soon. And I guaranteeed him that I would work through my entire notice period so I could complete all my pending projects. So I updated the courses, developed our brand new eLearning platform, finished hiring the

teachers for the next semester, and I even shot videos to promote every single course on the school's menu. With less than a week until my last day, my boss called me into his office to show me the company's new career plans. I don't know the equivalent terms in English, but it's the path planned by the company for the growth of each position. He told me, so you see, that's what you're going to earn in a few months. That is, if you stop being a sissy and just do your effing job. I couldn't believe it. After all the abuse, all the toxicity, I tried to go the higher

road and end everything on a good node. And he called my health issues being a sissy? I was done. I told him to just cut my next few days for my final paycheck and left. Now for the revenge. Remember how I introduced him to a friend and he actually hired the guy? On my last day, I told my boss that I would be opening my own private school after leaving, but I failed to mention that this other employee was my business partner.

So when my friend gave his 30 day notice, our boss was livid. He all but threw my friend out of the school, telling him to never set foot in there again, and to leave immediately. According to law, this means my boss had to pay for that whole month, plus every remaining day that he worked there. Plus commissions. Add on top of that my own last paycheck, which came with six months of benefits, and we had more than enough to start our new venture. But that's not the revenge. My boss actually made a sign some sort of NDA with a bunch of illegal clauses, which made

the whole contract invalid, preventing us from revealing any company secrets during or after our time with them at the risk of being fined $6,000. However, the contract couldn't legally stop us from reporting illegal activities, which is why I didn't worry one bit when I reported him in his school for having over 50 PCs running pirate versions of Windows, Office, the whole Adobe suite, Revit, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, and lots of other very expensive software. Not long before this, a big chain of stores had gone bankrupt in our state for having to pay fines upon fines on Windows alone, so it was an understatement to say the government was taking piracy pretty seriously at this time.

It gets funnier when you realize that the reported person receives an email with the whole complaint the minute it's filed. My ex-boss' response wasn't at all unexpected. Some five minutes after our report, a similar email came into our inbox, reporting us for 30 unlicensed copies of Windows and many other programs. My business partner still talked to the finance manager of our old job, and knowing that our ex-boss would probably be right next to that guy, fuming and screaming, my business partner decided to send that guy a picture of our only classroom, with no computer and sites.

A few weeks later, I heard the whole remaining staff abandon ship, leaving him with only an intern and a few teachers without permanent contracts. My former boss actually kept tabs on us, and after he learned that some of his teachers were contacting us to host classes, he started to blackmail them, threatening to terminate their contracts that they insisted on doing business with us, even though there was no exclusivity clause in their contracts. Some of them called him on his bluff, and he had to pay even more money by breaching their contracts. Time went by, and I hear them my ex-boss is counting his pennies and struggling to keep a float. He used to have completely full classes, but now he can barely fill one classroom.

Half the week he has to close his doors, not having enough students or the money to pay employees on those days. Before I left, he had paid out $40,000 to architects to expand his school, but now I hear that he was considering closing his doors and offering online only courses, even before the pandemic hit. And now for part two, where years after my revenge, I made my Xbox again pay a boatload of money, this time on legal fees. First of all, I need to say that at this point, my own school had closed its doors. That's life. My business partner and I cashed out, sold what we could, and we each went on with our lives. Some months later, I found out that our ex-boss was suing our school, which, as I mentioned,

didn't even exist anymore. My business partner's sister, who's also his lawyer, contacted me and told me about it. I couldn't find anything on the public record since a lawsuit was running on court ordered sigils, so I talked to my own lawyer and he said, if they didn't cite you directly, then pretend you don't know anything about this. And so, I just ignored the issue for a few years. During lockdown, the appointed official finally found me at my home and served me with court documents. These documents also gave me access to my boss's claims,

since I had 15 days to prepare my defense. My wife found me laughing out loud in front of my computer. His claims were absolutely ridiculous. He claimed that I stole his courses, and as proof, he had a printout from our now offline website which he compared side by side with his own and said like, It's become obvious that both schools have the same courses. However, he presented no explanation of the similarities besides the names, which weren't even the same thing.

For example, most of our classes were about teaching students how to make comic books, which he never worked with. He also called a cynical for daring to compete with him in the same market, even though it was my own previous experience in the education sector that got me this job in the first place. Also, on our website, we had a line that said that it was important to learn from your previous experiences. And the document said that was a confession of plagiarism. I asked my lawyer to let me write my own defend

and then have her translate it over to lawyer speak. She actually copied pace in my full statement, saying that she couldn't have argued it better. I put into paper all the disgust that I felt, cited all my experience with teaching, and rebuked every single one of his claims with facts and actual proof. I attached printed conversations, saved emails, and I brought attention to his own lack of proof. The judge tossed the case and made my boss pay all of my legal fees, including my lawyers. He could have avoided all of this if he just entered the lawsuit in small claims court,

but since he wanted that $30,000, he had it coming. Overall, it was just another shovel of dirt on his coffin. Also, down in the comments, OP adds an extra story where his ex-boss called him a homophobic slur. Apparently at one point his boss said, you're not an F-sler, are you? OP said, actually I'm bisexual. Okay, so not an F-sler. Foo! So down in the comments, people very quickly piece together that this took place in Brazil. And I'm really curious because I mean I don't know a lot about Brazil, but I have no clue which parts of this story scream Brazilian to me. So if I have any Brazilian fans out there,

can you like shed some light on this? What is it about this story that's uniquely Brazilian? Is it the guy's attitude? Is it the labor laws? Because I really don't know. That was our slash pro revenge, and if you like this content be sure to follow my podcast, because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. I really don't know. That was our Slashpower of Inge, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.